With an impressive line up of over 20 launch laptops featuring the new Snapdragon X Elite CPU, including the Dell XPS 13, Qualcomm’s bullish attitude to this year’s Computex Trade show is also backed up by some impressive benchmarks with it’s Windows-based laptops due for release in the next few weeks.
Snapdragon X Elite performance and laptop support
The likes of Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and Samsung are all onboard with extremely thin and light laptop models with premium models such as Dell’s premium XPS 13 using the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite CPU, while in the past the likes of Intel have dominated its XPS range. The reason? The new CPU promises more performance and far greater battery life in a range of applications, even gaming and content creation, with more than 24 hours between charges in many cases.
Snapdragon X Elite specifictions
The ARM-derived CPU features a Qualcomm Oryon 12-core CPU, Adrena GPU and Hexagon NPU with 45 TOPS, with some of the 20 plus laptops offering slightly lower core counts. The NPU or neural processing unit, which is designed from the ground up for generative AI tasks using a mix of heterogeneous processors, it’s this part that’s generating the headlines.
On show at Qualcomm’s various demos at Computex were some impressive benchmarks, with performances advantages over the likes of AMD’s Ryzen 9 7940HS and Intel’s Core Ultra 9 185H of up to a claimed 51 percent, all while using up to 65 percent less power, which would back up the claims of battery life lasting well over a day in many cases.
The demos also seem to back up the performance claims, where there was particular interest in gaming and content creation. Starting with the former and there were examples of several popular games running at 108op resolution at well over 30fps, especially as the GPU portion of Snapdragon X Elite supports frame-rate boosting FSR as well. However, Qualcomm did state that it’s goals for now are not to create laptops for hard core gamers, but those that would be classed as casual gamers, who currently use mobile devices equipped with integrated graphics or low end discrete GPUs.
Snapdragon X Elite gaming performance
Snapdragon X Elite also accelerates content creation software such as Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop as well as DaVinci Resolve, making it particularly attractive to those that edit videos on the go, but don’t want the added weight or power drain of a discrete GPU in their laptop.
Snapdragon X Elite AI performance
The AI features were just as impressive, with an app called DJ Pro able to separate different sounds in music such as vocals or bass in real time using the Hexagon neural processor.
A Snapdragon X Elite-powered Dell XPS 13
Qualcomm isn’t short of support from laptop manufacturers either and even Dell has seen fit to use the X Elite in it’s flagship sub 15 inch model, the XPS 13, with the XPS range traditionally using either Intel or AMD CPUs. The 22 new laptops will star arriving from 22nd June and all eyes will be on reviewers to see how they stack up against the competition.
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